Leo's Fortune Review (iOS)

Leo’s Fortune contains level-hopping worlds reminiscent of Sonic the Hedgehog, but it’s cloaked by some of the best design graphics you can find on an iOS game. There are some minor flaws to gameplay, but this latest app will certainly dazzle audiences with its sleek appearance and a variety of obstacle-ridden levels that will leave the player pretty hooked.

In Leo’s Fortune, we follow what we can only describe as a blue-green ball of fur with a surprisingly great mustache. His quest is simple; he must travel from home in order to get his hands on the cunning thief who stole all his gold. As he goes through the different levels, he collects more of his goal back and gets one step closer towards confronting the culprit. One would imagine that the general functions of this game would be a little bit more on the complicated side, assuming that it would be due to the sharp graphics. Instead the tutorial walks us through a fairly simple step-by-step process, one that gives the player an easier understanding as how to make the blob of fluff jump up and down the various obstacles that could end his journey rather abruptly.

Which brings us to our next topic; how easy or difficult is it to play the game. You must go through the tutorial, which is highly recommended if you want to zoom through the first two levels. The length of each level, even in the first map, feels like it takes a particularly long time to comb through. You’re zooming in and out of caves, jumping over spikes and anything else that comes in your way. At the same time it feels particularly long, especially for a game that’s set for the iPhone/iPad. There’s no timer to keep you in check and no way to figure out how much farther you have to go until you reach the invisible finish line. At least the game has the courtesy of saving where you last were if you happen to fall off a cliff to your death.

The difficulty is heightened up even more so if you don’t regularly clean your screen from any oils that may come from your face when you make phone calls. The more slippery the screen, the easier it is for you to lose control of the fuzzball and send him to a quick death. And when you don’t have actual buttons to press onto, it’s easy to have your thumbs slip around various parts of the screen and lose track as to where your fuzzy character is in the game, especially if he’s running through one of the caves. Here’s a tip--make sure you brighten up the screen a little more than you normally would in order to see parts of Leo’s Fortune better. The brighter it is, the easier it’ll be to avoid a spiky fate in those dank caves.

The general frustrations players would have with any sort of iOS game are apparent, but Leo’s Fortune definitely isn’t an app that will irritate you to the point of losing interest. There’s plenty of tricky devices that will try to obstruct your mustachioed hero, but it’s easy to sweep him over to another part of the screen and have him avoid certain death. Speaking of our hero, he’s got quite the strange and slightly goofy voice attached to that tiny blob of a body. He’s got the voice of a deep, over-the-top French man, complete with the occasional flicker of laughter. The fuzzball never moves his mouth, but you can hear that loud voice whenever you’re swooping through a cave or jumping high into the air.

In some ways the character’s voice throws the general feel of the world off. The overall music is rather dramatic, definitely setting a killer mood but the overly exaggerated French man voice coming out gives Leo’s Fortune this strange, child-like quality to the game. In some ways it fits because it lightens up the mood and makes the game more enjoyable, but at the same time it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the environment and it’s sleek levels.

It will take players a little while to really breeze past the levels in Leo’s Fortune, but the added time only gives people more time to bask in the lush environments our hero has to fly through. The difficulty does build up the higher of levels you reach, but making your way through each course is a lot of fun to do.

This review was completed with a downloaded copy of Leo's Fortune for iOS.